Andrew M Brown is the Telegraph's obituaries editor.

The answer to the diabetes scourge: eat kosher?

The outer leaves of the plants on Mauritius's sugar cane plantations are burnt before harvest, as this aids the cutting process (Photo: JENNY ZARINS)

We want everything to be sweeter these days – our bread, our pies, our strawberries – and it's killing us. That, crudely summarised, is the gist of a worrying new study in the British Medical Journal. Sugar – sucrose, the plain white stuff you buy by the pound – isn’t the main problem, though. It’s high fructose corn syrup we should be concerned about. This is the dead cheap sweetener made from maize, which in many countries, such as the United States, is preferred to sugar by the food industry. Maize is cheap in the US and has been for several decades, since it’s heavily subsidised by the government. Proper sugar is much more expensive, so not surprisingly Coca-Cola and Pepsi have been using HFCS to sweeten their delicious beverages in the US since the Eighties. In Britain, where HFCS is often called glucose-fructose syrup on ingredients labels, Coke and other soft drinks still use sucrose, by and large.

There all sorts of worries about HFCS and its effect on our health. Never before in human history have we been guzzling so much fructose, and it might be even worse for us than ordinary sugar. Wise heads like the great Dr Atkins and John Yudkin cautioned years ago about our sugar addiction and the terrible hazards of the misguided craze for low-fat diets. (Yudkin wrote the landmark work on the subject, Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us, back in 1972.) But their warnings were ignored, partly because they didn’t suit the powerful food industry.

Now we are paying the price for our sweet tooth. Not only are a quarter of Britons overweight today, but on the horizon looms the spectre of one of the world’s most serious chronic diseases: type 2 diabetes. Countries that use a lot of HFCS in their food supply have a significantly higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes, the BMJ reports, than countries that do not use the sweetener. The US had the highest per capita consumption – the average American gets through 25kg (55 lbs) HFCS a year. Second was Hungary (16 kg per person).

The good news for Britain is that we are, at the moment, quite low down the scale: we only eat or drink half a kilo of HFCS a year. As a society, we should be very wary of taking on board more of this stuff. Tim Lobstein of the International Association for the Study of Obesity says that if HFCS is a risk factor for diabetes, “we need to rewrite national dietary guidelines and review agriculture trade policies. HFCS will join trans fats and salt as ingredients to avoid.”

Drinks made with HFCS have 30 per cent more fructose than if they were made with sucrose, Lobstein says, and there is growing evidence that the body metabolises fructose differently from glucose: independently of insulin and primarily in the liver, where it is converted to fat. “This may be contributing to the rise in the prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition that is increasing among Hispanic people in the US and Mexico,” says Lobstein.

But what to do, if you live in America, like drinking Coke and want to avoid HFCS? There is an answer: kosher Coke. Passover Coke is produced in Atlanta on a special production line, supervised by a rabbi. Because Jews are forbidden from eating leaven over Passover, grain-derived syrup is not permitted. So cane sugar is used instead. According to Consumer Reports, there are three sources of sugared Coke in the US: Passover Coke, (often expensive) Mexican imports, and a Coca-Cola bottler in Cleveland, which still uses sucrose. This Coke not only avoids the worrying high fructose corn syrup, but taste tests suggest that it has a purer, cleaner sweetness. Even so, bearing in mind John Yudkin's disturbing findings in Pure White and Deadly, it's probably best to drink it in moderation.